“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?
I can't believe I'm reading this bullshit about democracy and "landed gentry" from a goddamn CEO of an advertising corporation who wants to literally monetize the eyeballs of every human being on his site, people who are only there because those "gentries" keep his site from turning to shit at no cost to him.
Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.
The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.
He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.
If I were on the board, I’d be engaged in discussion with my fellow board members right now about whether spez is demonstrating the temperament befitting a good CEO.
Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.
The reason for spez to be out is less the decisions and more the execution and communication. He clearly sucks at PR.
But it may the intent to have him make all the unpopular changes, have him resign with a big payout, and blame him for everything without reversing anything like they did with Ellen Pao.
how do you think the board (any board) feels about a mod clique that is willing to turn a 2-day blackout into an indefinite closure, possibly followed by indefinite "touch grass tuesdays" or other disruptions to business operations?
you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?
no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.
And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.
Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.
It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.
The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!
Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.
If you're talking about the ginormous default subs, then yeah -- the landed gentry analogy is kind of apt. You can't just make your own alternative to r/pics or whatever and expect to gain traction without some unique angle and a lot of work.
(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)
If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.
For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.
Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.
Subreddits may be nearly infinite, but good, descriptive subreddit names are not. r/videos is going to get more natural traffic than r/ReallyCoolNewVideos, which is going to get more natural traffic than r/asdlkajflaksjf.
Sure, but it's a reddit joke, because r/trees is devoted to marijuana(which exists because of a protest against bad mods on r/marijuana).
Probably non-reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.
r/videos gets more natural traffic because it's a default sub. Regardless, making a subreddit isn't some competition. You don't need to be bigger than the subreddit you're forking from.
Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.)
> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.
You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?
In the rest of the interview, spez goes on about how subreddits should be democratized, and be able to vote for/vote out mods. Perhaps he should take his concept further, and let the community vote for/vote out him and his ideas.
> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.
This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the ___domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.
If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.
There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.
Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?
And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.
> The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.
Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.
Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.
Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.
I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.
If the best person for a job is a habitual liar who abuses and defames people that helped grow the company, maybe that job shouldn't exist. And somehow, I don't think the CEO's childish attitude is what even the investors hoped for.
You think it's democratic if the investors picked him? That's not democracy, that oligarchy.
But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.
That’s not what an oligarchy is. It’s pretty close to the exact opposite, as an oligarchy is when the government gives individuals (oligarchs) monopolies over industries and enforces them with their monopoly on violence. Really wish people would actually learn the definition of this word instead of throwing it around in place of everything they don’t like.
That is not what I said. I said I can find 100,000 people more qualified than spez to be CEO of Reddit. I would only pull from a pool if maybe a few hundred globally if I were looking for the position. ie spez wouldn't be remotely considered. That has nothing to do with rounding.
> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
It is funny and almost the same level of funny as CEOs saying WFH is not fair to people can't do WFH ( why won't you think of all the poor people, who are not laptop class you awful person )!
Reddit (spez) created that "landed gentry"[1], and was more than happy with its existence until roughly two weeks ago. It is Reddit's policies, procedures, and practices which created a first-come, first serve, seniority-based moderator role. Not the volunteers who stepped up and assumed that role, uncompensated by Reddit.
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Notes:
1. Actual landed gentry labeling volunteer labour they'd cultivated and created as "landed gentry" has to go down as one of the most audacious rhetorical distractions of all time. Or at least the past week.
I've read up on it and while the ideas are interesting, the wording is incorrect, you should not use a word that means exactly the opposite of what you intend. The moment you want to impose a system of any kind, you stopped being anti-system. But I guess that's the essence of anarchism, using confusing terminology to a degree reminiscent of doublespeak.
Not really. It's usually twenty somethings that somehow think the world wouldn't devolve into chaos if there wasn't a structure to organise society and secure it.
There's no need to devolve into Reddit commenting style. My comment is not defending any *ism and I won't reply with anything worthwhile when the tone is mudslinging.
> What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?
It makes him just like many authoritarian dictators in history. Taking something of value away from the people who actually built it, and claiming it's for the people while it's really all about giving him power.
Completely unsurprising in this case though. These people built their communities on someone else's platform, and now they want to be paid. This is bound to happen.
I'm glad u/spez cares so much about "democracy". For a second there I thought he was trying to extract profit off the backs of the mods who built the communities for him.
There's a first time for everything. I agree with spez. That is a very on point description of Mods, and it needs to be fixed. Just because you came first to /r/news doesn't mean you should rule like a king on Reddit. It is too open for abuse and politics.
No, it really doesn't. Both what I wrote and what you wrote can be correct. A moderator on a single big sub can, for example, turn it in a red or blue political direction no matter if s/he is a mod for a week or a year. As Reddit is a Corporation we will never see a democratic style mod selection, but in my opinion it is one of the big changes Reddit needs.
Or the people who made moderator tooling to hack around his lack of moderator tooling.
Or those who wrote entire third party apps to get around his lack of viable third party apps.
Or those people who had to implement accessibility for the blind or otherwise disabled to get around his lack of tooling for the blind or otherwise disabled.
But besides all those people, yeah he pays the bills.
Well okay he doesn't actually pay anything, it's the investors and advertisers that pay the actual bills.
But other than all that spez contributes by.... Uhh ..... Lowering server costs by causing a mass exodus?
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...
“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?